What’s good for baseball…

As all of the end-of-season numbers come out, certain trends emerge. Mostly, those trends involve the Yankees and their popularity. The team led the AL in home and road attendance, and the YES Network is more popular than ESPN in the New York City area.

Yesterday, Maury Brown at the Biz of Baseball released FOX’s top most watched games of the season, and unsurprisingly, they all involved the Yankees. Take a look:

[TABLE=38]

First, the Yanks performed spectacularly poorly on FOX during their most popular games this year. They went 1-4 and were outscored 58-23. No wonder more than a few national baseball commentators were lukewarm on the team for the playoffs. If the representative sample looks so bad, baseball writers tend to ignore the 157 other games and the 102 additional wins.

Second, the Yankees are good for baseball. Their games draw viewers to FOX. Although one of these games was the first national exhibition at the new stadium, the rest were just your run-of-the-mill midseason games against a few archrivals. That popularity means more money for baseball.

For Yankee fans, this news means more Tim McCarver and Joe Buck and more weekend Boston/New York series. TV executives and the scheduling gurus recognize that these series are great for baseball. People are taken in by the games, and generally — although not as much this year — the baseball is crisp and compelling. Analysts and fans of other teams might like to complain, but in the end, the truth is simple: The Yankees are good for baseball. Just look at the numbers.